Californians connect the dots on issues from immigrants’ rights to healthcare access and environmental justice

The news out of Washington, DC over the past few months sends a clear message: Californians need a unified approach to ensuring all people and communities are safe and healthy – and we can’t afford to work one issue at a time. From the House of Representatives’ recent vote to strip healthcare coverage from millions of Americans to an escalation in Immigration & Customs Enforcement raids targeting undocumented immigrants to efforts to undo environmental protections, the risk of losing hard-won ground is very real. In addition to protecting the gains we’ve made, diverse advocates are demonstrating how we can keep moving toward a positive vision for the future. Our call to action, Maintaining Our Gains, Leading Toward the Future, outlines key priorities and principles to guide our actions as residents, business leaders, public health practitioners, advocates, community leaders, and policymakers. These key priorities include: 

• Defending the Affordable Care Act, asserting the right to universal healthcare access, and investing in community-based prevention. 
• Protecting environmental regulations, setting bold environmental targets, and investing in infrastructure that ensures health and climate justice.
• Sustaining funding for public infrastructure that supports health, and protecting and strengthening public oversight of public-sector functions, from our streets and freeways to our education systems and prisons. 
• Supporting government’s role in assuring health and wellbeing for low-income people, including strengthening the social safety net and creating pathways out of poverty.
• Creating sanctuaries in our state, counties, cities, and public spaces, and protecting the ability of undocumented families to stay together.
• Strengthening public programs focused on preventing violence, and opposing the criminalization of immigrants, people of color, people experiencing homelessness, and people living with mental illness.

Together, Californians from all walks of life can take a proactive stance that propels us toward a healthy, just, and sustainable future.  

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Nearly 40 organizations representing social justice, youth, community organizing, environmental justice, conservation, public health, and healthcare have already signed on to support the priorities and principles in Maintaining Our Gains, Leading Toward the Future. 

We are speaking up to protect the gains we’ve made in expanding healthcare access, immigrants’ rights, environmental protections, and investments that make our communities healthy and safe. In these uncertain times, it’s not enough to oppose ideas and reject policies that violate our values of fairness and inclusion. We must continue to push ahead toward a future that is fair, just, and prosperous for all people who call California home. 

If your organization is interested in endorsing this call to action, please contact Juliet@preventioninstitute.org. We also encourage you to share this call to action with your colleagues, neighbors, and policymakers.